It appears that our YouTube account has been shut down, and I’m not sure why. I’m working to see if I can get it reactivated, which may take a few days.
However, we will absolutely continue to produce videos at every opportunity, and will change to a different video host if necessary. We have every one of our published videos backed up locally, and one way or another they will be back online ASAP.
Let us know if there’s anything we can do to help get the account reactivated. If you need people to come forward and attest to the fact that your channel wasn’t promoting spam, I think many of us would be happy to do so. I greatly appreciate your hard work and I look forward to the channel being restored!
This happens to other people on a regular basis. YouTube deals with lots of (usually legitimate) complaints daily so their complaints process is fairly automated. I seriously doubt that anyone at YouTube actually looked at your videos. I suspect that if you are able to actually contact someone at YouTube you will be able to get back up in short order.
Large media (e.g. record, movie and TV) companies abuse the complaints process fairly regularly to shut down smaller competitors (who use YouTube as a promotion medium). I doubt though that the RIAA or MPAA companies are too worried about you just yet. They usually base their claims on alleged copyright violations.
However since this was reported as “spam, scam, or commercially deceptive content”, it’s likely you have simply offended someone very recently. In the era of being able to buy fake Twitter followers and fake Facebook friends by the thousand, arranging lots of “spam” complaints by using fake YouTube accounts is probably pretty cheap and easy.
While I don’t want to point any fingers at anyone in particular, you might want to think about if anyone might want revenge for something you’ve said recently.
YouTube is a strange place this sort of thing happens way too often
hope you get your account back soon
This is disappointing. I’d honestly say there are several dozen bad gun channels on youtube that well deserve to be shut down long before your channel. I fail to see how any copyright was broken in your videos, and unlike so many channels out there, yours remained entirely professional. I’m sure you must have insulted somebody enough to target your account, but exactly how you can insult someone with weapon takedowns, interviews and book reviews is beyond me. Actually, maybe it was your book reviews showing select pages? Then again, that seems to be a silly way of copyright protection seeing as you’re promoting most of these books. Who knows, maybe youtube has a “explosions per second” requirement for firearm videos to follow the FPSRussia trend, or 60 minute knife reviews to copy Nutnfancy, because god forbid there be professional informative no-tricks videos on youtube.
Best of luck at getting the channel back up. If it doesn’t work out, I hope you find a better host.
Youtube also has other rules than those about copyright.
Going strictly by the error messages, it seems the latest book review was considered “spam, scam, or commercially deceptive content.”
And youtube just took down the entire account with no warning or explanation.
It’s been over a day now, still no word?
Disappointing.
Let us know if there’s something we can do. You have the full support of at least a few other websites & forums that I know of.
I appreciate it – and yes, I’m still waiting to hear anything. It appears that contacting a live person at YouTube has been intentionally made very difficult. OTOH, some of the other folk I found on Google who have been in this situation had their accounts reactivated without ever hearing back from a real person. If the situation isn’t resolved by tomorrow morning I’ll start following up other options.
I have been having trouble with my German e-mail site not being able to send out reply mail for about a week. Also, my Google search engine stopped working yesterday. Now, no forgotten weapons. I am disabled from an accident; I quit television years ago however, I do look forward to these forgotten weapons shows nightly. I wonder if the problems that I am having with Google and the e-mail might be related to your You Tube problem. As I have gotton older I also realise that some companies as they grow don’t want the business of smaller customers. I wish you all my best and look forward to viewing your shows somewhere.